Blog Archives

Did your holiday gift budget shrink considerably this year? Your friends and family need never be the wiser: You just need to know where to find the best deals. Photo by ginnerobot.

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite sites for finding great deals online, and now we’re back with the five most popular answers. Let’s take a closer look at the best sites on the internet designed to help you stretch your dollar further this holiday season and beyond.

Slickdeals

Slickdeals.net is a comprehensive deal-finding web site with an active user community dedicated to scouring the web for great deals. Slickdeals posts deals in a blog-like format, providing a uncategorized and steady stream of deals on their home page covering the gamut from tech to toys and clothing to appliances. Avid users emphasize that while you should certainly come to Slickdeals for the front page deals, you should stick around for the thriving and thrift-conscious forums.

DealsPlus

Relative newcomer DealsPlus is much like the other popular deal finders listed but with a twist: It integrates social bookmarking features à la Digg or Delicious to help the most popular deals rise to the top. DealsPlus users submit deals and vote on the submitted deals they like; popular deals make the DealsPlus home page. If you're nuts about deals and user-driven content, DealsPlus may be right up your alley.

Dealnews

Dealnews is a popular deal finder "where every day is Black Friday." In contrast to the blog-like style of Slickdeals, the Dealnews front page organizes deals by category. While Dealnews has a clear emphasis on tech, it's no slouch when it comes to covering other categories, like clothing, home, and toys. It's friendly interface—complete with large pictures of featured product deals—makes it a fun and easy scan for the casual deal-searcher.

FatWallet

FatWallet is a popular deal-finding web site that aims to help you maintain a healthily plump wallet. Probably best known for it's active community of prudent spenders, FatWallet is an excellent resource for saving money online and off. As deal finders go, FatWallet doesn't do the same front page style as sites like Dealnews or Slickdeals, but if you do a little digging, you can find plenty of great deal streams—like in their Hot Deals forum.

PriceGrabber

Unlike the rest of the competition in this Hive Five, PriceGrabber is a comparison shopping web site that searches and compares prices from popular online retailers to bring you the lowest price available price. Apart from the simple search, PriceGrabber supports Price Alerts and rates products based on expert and user reviews.

---

Now that you’ve seen the best, it’s time to vote for your favorite.
Which Is the Best Site for Finding Deals Online?
( surveys)
This week’s honorable mentions go out to the always-popular Amazon (not strictly a deal-finder, but it certainly has consistently competitive prices), Ben’s Bargains, and Craigslist. Whether or not your favorite made the short list, tell us more about what makes it so great in the comments.

GotReception is a user driven map of cellphone reception strength. Users can login and submit reviews of the location they are at and the cellphone reception they are recieving there. GotReception then compiles the results of the thousands of user submissiosn into a cloud style map showing the clusters of good reception for the carrier you search for. The sample map in the screenshot above shows coverage for the five major carriers in Detroit. You can look at all of them to get an idea of where they overlap and which have the greatest reach, or par it down to just the carrier you are interested in. For another cellphone coverage tracking service, check out Signal Map.

Faced with shelling out hundreds of extra dollars for a higher priced clothing wardrobe at IKEA, just to get the sliding pants rack he wanted, Instructables user Phantazn set about crafting his own. If you’ve ever looked at the wasted space beneath the hanging clothes in a wardrobe and thought that it might be better spent than as a shoebox graveyard, this project is for you. By purchasing some cheap pine dowels and wood, along with a $5 set of drawer sliders, he was able to put together a perfectly serviceable sliding pants rack even nicer than the wire model in the more expensive wardrobe. For other closet related hacks, check out how to avoid over-wearing outfits with a left to right closet and using your hangers to tell you which outfits you never wear.

In the midst of the financiapocalypse, layoffs are an inevitability. Just this morning, in fact, a close friend lost her job to the insatiable beast that is our current financial meltdown—leaving her with all kinds of questions about what she should do next. Since we're all likely to be touched in some way or another by the far-reaching and widespread layoffs, we're wondering: Even if you've been doing your best to recession-proof your career, what steps should you take toward recovery if worst comes to worst and you've been laid off? Let's hear your strategies—whether you've been there before or you just like to be prepared—in the comments. Photo by conorwithonen.

Smart Money magazine crunches the numbers on the cost versus benefit of various paid memberships to find you five with a high value. While you may not be in a position to take advantage of all of the memberships (you can’t sign up for an AARP membership if you’re a ripe old twenty two, for example) the list has a variety of potential money savers. At the zoo, for example:

A family of four visiting the San Diego Zoo for the day would pay $132, including one-day admission ($28.50 per adult, $18.50 per child) and rides on the Journey Into Africa tour ($10 per adult, $3 per child) and Skyfari air tram ($3 per person). Signing up for a family membership costs just $5 more — and comes with a year of free entry, free rides and other perks.

The quote echoes my experience, having paid a few extra dollars for my first zoo visit to secure a pass that allows my nuclear family plus 4 guests for a year, instead of just a day. Averaged over the next year the monthly zoo visits a couple bucks a person. Other potential sources of savings highlighted in the article are warehouse clubs (shop for cheap staples like milk and eggs, avoid gimmicky 40 pound pallets of junky food) and an AAA membership (the $48 enrollment fee is recovered with a single call for a tow truck). What memberships have you saved money with? Share in the comments below and help your fellow readers save a buck or two. Photo by Sir Mervs.

The Macworld blog offers a few tips on doing comparison shopping between the major MP3 music stores. With Wal-Mart having recently slash prices on their online music tracks, the author recommends Safari uses create a web clip of the store’s Top Albums page and use a dashboard widget to search both the iTunes and Amazon store. There are a handful of other worthy links worth checking, including feeds of iTunes deals and free tracks, but the true discount is finding music for free. Read on for a few humble suggestions on doing that.

Find your tunes on the web

Our own Adam Pash has written the book on comprehensive web searching for a free album or song across the web’s many and varied sites. From music blog aggregator Hype Machine to straight-up MP3 searches with BeeMP3, if you can't find it on one of those sites, you've got a tried and true friend: A Google search that returns MP3s in open directories. Here's the string—just replace the "Album" and "Artist" and the like with your intended find:

Grab it from a friend

If your friend’s just blatantly insisting that you check out this new album that’s going to blow your mind, you could always just ask him to share his MP3s through a share-friendly online storage service—unless that friend bought their album off the iTunes store. If they can bring an iPod loaded with the tracks to your crib, you can copy music from iPod to computer, no matter what model they’re rocking. If there’s a distance factor, try having them install and share tracks with Mojo. The software has its quirks, but it often gets the job done. If they’re DRM-protected tracks, you might try doubleTwist or DVDneXtCopy’s faux-CD-burner. Those without legit access to an iTunes-bought track, though, will likely have to beg a friend to burn a CD, and then import it with a bit of audio quality loss.

Grab the audio from a video

Bands want to see their songs promoted, so they take their show on tour, do press interviews, and, more than that, make videos for their singles. If you’re looking for just such a song, why not use the audio that’s already floating around for free? Free web tools like Vixy and VidToMP3 automatically grab tracks from YouTube or other video URLs. Want a bit more control over audio quality and track format? Try reader Matt’s suggested method for recording YouTube music videos to MP3.

Update: Finally, as Coldmiser points out, your local library, especially in a larger metropolitan area, often has a pretty decent selection of CDs for borrowing and, if you’re cool with it, importing to your collection.

How do you save money, or search for deals, when you’re actually buying MP3s? What tools do you use to check whether a song or album is available free before dropping the cash? Tell us your techniques in the comments.

Google Maps has long been able to translate an address into a latitude and longitude. Now it can do the opposite—turn a latitude and longitude value into a (pretty approximate) address. Blogger Amit Agarawal has created a mashup to display the reverse-geocoded address when you click on a map, and MeetWays provides you with an address of location equidistant between you and someone you’d like to hang out with.

Web site Roost is a feature-rich real estate search engine that finds homes for sale in your area, displays them on a Google Map, and narrows results based on price, bedrooms, baths, square feet, and more. The site isn't exactly ground-breaking—sites like previously mentioned Zillow have been around for a while—but it's got a much friendlier user interface and still offers all kinds of useful information. The only problem: currently Zillow has way more results than Roost, which is ultimately more important to a buyer than looks. So while Zillow appears to win out on data at the moment, Roost could easily win over a lot of searchers over time with improved search results and its friendly interface.

Free web photo utility MirrorEffect.net does pretty much what you’d guess. Find an image with a clean background, or at least cropped to single out the object, choose where you want the reflection, and tell the app if you want a scaled effect to look like light bending. You can also choose to have the reflection be transparent, but there’s no sliding scaler for that effect, unfortunately. Upload the image and you’ll get the result decently fast. There’s not a lot of options, obviously, but for pulling off that clean, Apple-promo-esque look, it’s a helpful tool for those not quite handy with an editor. MirrorEffect.net is free to use, doesn’t require a sign-up.

Using a couple of basic tools in Photoshop and other image editing programs, you can take a flat image and make it pop with just a little bit of effort and no experience in the finer arts of exposure and color correction. With a little practice, you can get some quick and dirty work done in just seconds that will make your presentation, blog, or social network profile pictures look a lot better online. Even cellphone snapshots can be made presentable while your instant noodles soften. Here’s how:

This bulldog is quite cute, but the flat contrast, dead colors, blur and noise aren’t doing it’s already comically bemused mug any favors. Let’s see if we can’t create a profile picture that will get the pack on Dogster howling. While for the purposes of this demonstration I’ll be using Photoshop, the same work can be done in GIMP, Paint.NET and other full-featured image editing software applications.

Love Your Curves

Select Image > Adjustments > Curves from the Photoshop drop-down menus. Welcome to the most awesome digital image editing tool known to human (and bulldog) kind.
See the three eye-dropper icons near the bottom? Our first chore is to select the first one to set the black point of the image. The goal is click on the darkest portion of the image in order to set the low threshhold for detail. The point you select and everything darker will become true black. I selected a corner of shadow in the top-left of the image.
Next, we use the middle eye-dropper to set the gray point. It doesn't matter how dark or light the point is — just that it's supposed to be a neutral gray tone. This can quickly remove a color-cast, which often occur when a camera set to indoor light is used outdoors or vice-versa. If a gray object has a reddish tinge, for instance, this feature will make it color-neutral and shift the colors in the rest of the image accordingly. I selected a bit of what's supposed to be white wall near the top of the image.Finally, we use the last eye-dropper to set the white point. This is pretty much the opposite of setting the black point. Click on the brightest portion of the image, in this case, the highlight on our furry friend’s cheek.
Now our simple black diagonal line has been joined by red, green and blue friends. These represent how the eye-droppers adjusted the red, green and blue parts of the image. Behind them, the gray shape is called a “histogram,” and shows the distribution of tones in the image. What we want to do is make sure the range of tones in the final photo equals the possible range of a digital image. So we grab those little sliders at the bottom and adjust the dark and light points to match where the colored lines first meet the bottom and the top of the graph, respectively.
Now that the image is as color-correct as you can expect after twenty seconds of fiddling, we'll want to bump up the contrast. Why should you hate Brightness and Contrast? Because it would preserve all the image data in the shadows and highlights that our histogram promises is there. So instead we'll create an "s-curve" to pump up the contrast. First, select a point midway along the black diagonal line. Just click to select — don't move it.
Now we’ll select another point halfway between the midpoint and the highlight, or three-quarters of the way up the line. This we’ll move very slightly up and to the left.
Add a point on the other side of the mid-point, and move it a little down and to the right. The more extreme your “s” the more contrast you’ll perceive. (Inversely, if you have a u-shaped histogram with lots of color information in the dark and light areas, you can reduce contrast by pointing the “s” in the other direction.)

Unsharp Mask is Your New BFF

There are two problems with this image, and we can fix one but not the other — namely, it's a little blurry thanks to the cheap plastic iPhone lens, and it's "noisy" (the spattering of grainy color throughout) because of the cheap iPhone image capture chip and heavy doses of JPEG compression. Sharpening increases the contrast between a range of pixels, which can make the image clearer but also brings out the noise. Normally you might just try Filters > Sharpen > Sharpen or Filters > Sharpen > Sharpen More and eyeball it, but this calls for a little finesse. Since I'll be reducing the image size quite a bit, I'm going to go for sharp and a little noisy, and use Filters > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask to massage it. Amount sets how much additional contrast is desired, radius determines the are sampled around each pixel, and threshold sets how different two tones need to be before the filter kicks in. Futz with these for a few seconds until you like what you see — I'd say my adjustment is about medium-to-light sharpening.

Don’t Be an Image Size Queen

While you want to start with the highest-resolution image with the least amount of compression you can, and do all your adjustments and filters at that size, you don't want to choke up someone's screen real estate and bandwidth with a huge image. And nothing smooths over the bumps in a photo's personality like a trip to the shrink. Select Image > Adjustments > Image Size and re-size it to something appropriate (in this case, I re-sized to 247 pixels wide by 300 pixels tall for the before-and-after images at the top).

Compress Your File Into Skinny Jeans

Don't be a bandwidth-hog with fatty files. Use File > Save For Web to let you set the compression level and preview both the image quality and the file size. By default, I usually set the JPEG compression level to 65 — which in this case means an image just a tad under 25 kilobytes, which shouldn't bother broadband users. Et voila, our sweet puppy will soon be getting invitations to all the best purebred parties.

(Original image by Artur Bergman)